Strategic Entrepreneurship in the Context of International Expansion: A Study of Success Factors and Challenges for Indian Startups Pursuing Global Growth (KEY IJP************724)

• Lalit Kishor Pandey

Abstract

This paper investigates whether national and entrepreneurial framework conditions positively affect economic growth via its effects on entrepreneurial activity more significantly than via its effects on technological innovation intensity.The most crucial ones are described as limited and lack access to finance, lack of managerial and labour skills, inability to equip modern technology, incompetent marketing and research & design strategies, increasing cost of labour, inadequate government policies and governance, political instability, and corruption. The background of this study is the upcoming topic social media in combination with entrepreneurship. Social media is offering potential entrepreneurs a lot of opportunities. It can be noticed that in the nowadays generations more and more people seeking to have their own business through social media. Therefore the research question of this paper should be: How people become entrepreneurs with the help of social media on the example of self-employed companies? The purpose of this study is to crave out the creating process of how to become an entrepreneur with the help of social media focused on self-employed companies. In the theoretical framework the terms entrepreneurship, self-employment, opportunity recognition, creation and discovery theory, digitalism and social media will be defined and detailed examined. For this thesis a qualitative research study was chosen. Therefore qualitative interviews with prepared questions with nine companies who got self-employed through social media have been executed. The chosen companies are dealing with businesses as photography, travelling, music or fashion. Furthermore the interviewed companies are from four different countries but the main part is from Germany. It was important that the companies are created through social media, self-employed, not bigger than three employees and not older than five years. The researcher decided for a deductive approach. The empirical data from the interviews were analyzed with the help of the theoretical framework to find significant outcomes and conclusions. The conclusion for this thesis is that social media has a huge influence on all interviewed self-employed persons Facebook, Instagram and YouTube are the most popular platforms to start the business with. Self-recognition from followers and the fact that social media is a great and cheap marketing opportunity, influenced people to become self-employed. The interviewed companies saw the opportunities to use their skills and knowledge to discover something new, which has not been there before or to create something that is better than the competitors and brings a new value to the market.